Chapter Text
Joyce used to believe nothing could ever eclipse the night Will vanished or that terrible moment at Starcourt when she was sure she’d lost Hopper for good. But pain, it seemed, had a way of proving her wrong. People often say that misfortune comes in threes. Joyce always thought that was just something folks said to make sense of the chaos, but now, faced with the third and sharpest blow of her life, she wondered if there was some truth to it after all.
And God, how she wished she could turn back time and push this last heartbreak away, send it back to whatever darkness it had crawled from.
Only a week had crawled by since El had given herself up for the sake of a world that would never understand what it owed her. Joyce couldn’t stop thinking about that. The world didn’t deserve El; it never had. What stung most was how utterly invisible her sacrifice would always be. El had saved everyone, yet almost no one even knew her name. That kind of anonymity felt crueler than any monster the Upside Down could conjure. Her daughter deserved to be known—not for her powers, not for the battles she fought, but simply for being herself. For being El.
Joyce couldn’t piece together more than scattered fragments of the week that followed that night. Even calling it a blur seemed generous. Her memories were stitched together in flashes: a harsh room, military uniforms, the relentless barrage of questions—each one sharper than the last, each one suggesting she was hiding something. They were convinced El was still somewhere in Hawkins, just out of reach, and they treated Joyce like the keeper of some secret she couldn’t possibly give them. The anger she felt burned deep in her chest, and she wanted nothing more than to rip their heads off, one by one.
But eventually, the truth seemed to get through. El was gone. Really gone. The soldiers finally packed up, the checkpoints and barriers vanished overnight, and Hawkins exhaled for the first time in what felt like forever.
At first, Joyce had been stunned by how quickly it all ended. No fallout, no arrests, no consequences, not even after half the soldiers ended up dead. But then it hit her: for the military to punish them, they’d have to expose their own secrets—the experiments, the cover-ups, the whole rotten mess. That was a scandal too big for them to risk.
And so to make sure the whole ordeal stayed buried, the government decided to pull some strings—a little trade off. In exchange for everyone’s silence, they made Hopper officially “undead.” Fresh paperwork, a shiny new social security number—on paper, he was a regular citizen again. The deal was simple: keep quiet about everything that happened, and everyone involved in that last fight would walk free, no questions asked. Just like that, Hopper was back in the world, the government’s hands stayed spotless, and the past was locked away for good.
After the interrogation had finally ended following El’s devastating sacrifice, Joyce found herself in Hopper’s arms, clutching him and the boys like they were the only solid things left in the world. Will and Jonathan went back to the Wheelers’, as did the rest of the party. But Joyce and Hopper returned to the cabin, the place that had once felt like a haven. After that, her memory dissolved. She couldn’t recall anything except the sound of Hopper’s grief, raw and ragged, echoing through the empty rooms. His sorrow was so heavy, so all-consuming, that she let it swallow hers too. There simply wasn’t room for both.
Right now, getting Hopper through each day was all that mattered. Her own pain could wait. So she closed the gates to her grief and locked them tight, letting numbness settle in their place.
“Mom?” Jonathan’s voice was barely above a whisper, but it still jolted her from her trance. She’d been hunched at the kitchen table for so long the pattern in the wood had started to blur, her hands wrapped tight around a mug that had gone cold hours ago.
She forced a smile, thin and weary. “Hi, honey.” Her gaze dropped again, thumb absently tracing the rim of the cup, as if the warmth might come back if she just kept touching it.
Jonathan crossed the room and let out a soft sigh as he settled into the chair across from her. “Mom,” he repeated, gentler this time.
“What, Jonathan?” Her words came out sharper than she intended, edged with exhaustion and a resentment she couldn’t quite bury. She wasn’t ready for questions. Not now.
He pressed his lips together, studying her, searching for the mother he remembered under the exhaustion. Her skin, already pale, had taken on a grayish cast, almost translucent in the morning light. There were shadows under her eyes so deep it looked like she hadn’t slept for days—which, as far as Jonathan knew, was true. None of them had. The grief was too raw, the house too quiet. Her hair hung limp around her face, as though she’d made a half-hearted attempt at brushing it and stopped caring halfway through. Even her lips were cracked, the color of faded roses. She looked worse than she had the week Will disappeared, and he hadn’t thought that was possible.
She met his gaze, her knuckles whitening around the mug, and for a second, he saw a challenge in her eyes, daring him to push further. He almost did. Almost. But something stopped him.
Instead, he tried a different tack. “Where’s Hopper?”
For a split second, something flickered in her expression—anger, fear, Jonathan couldn’t tell—but it vanished before he could be sure. He opened his mouth to press her, but she spoke first, her voice low and distant, pulling him back from his thoughts.
“He’s sleeping,” she said, her voice flat. She lifted the mug to her lips out of habit, not thinking about the coffee’s chill until it hit her tongue. The taste made her wince; she coughed softly and set the mug down, pushing the offending contents away from her.
Jonathan might have laughed, once. He would have teased her gently, and she would have rolled her eyes. But laughter felt like something ancient now, some relic from a different lifetime.
“And when did you last sleep?” he asked. He knew he was risking a fight, poking at the frayed edges of her patience, but he couldn’t help it.
Joyce exhaled a heavy, weary sigh, the kind that seemed to scrape up from somewhere deep inside her. She fumbled in her pocket until her fingers found the battered pack of Camels, the paper soft and creased from too many anxious hands. She shook one loose and sparked her lighter, pretending not to notice Jonathan’s silent disapproval. Quitting had been the plan—her and Hopper, together, promising themselves a fresh start. But that promise had vanished the day they lost El. Since then, the old habit was less a weakness than a tether, something to cling to when the rest of the world felt like it was spinning off its axis.
She drew a long drag, and for a moment, she just breathed, lost somewhere only she could go. Then her gaze found Jonathan’s face, and really saw him for the first time that morning.
“Are you and Will still planning to stay at the Wheelers’ a little longer?” she asked, steering the conversation away from herself with practiced skill as she tapped the cigarette ash into the cracked ashtray sitting on the table.
Jonathan noticed the dodge. She didn’t answer, and she wasn’t going to, not yet. But he let it slide. Grief didn’t follow a schedule, and he knew better than to push her before she was ready to talk.
But that also didn’t make it any easier to stop worrying about her.
“I don’t think the cabin is where we should be right now, Mom,” Jonathan said, his voice gentle but clear. “Will wants to be there for Mike, and—” He hesitated, searching her face, waiting for a sign that she understood. “I don’t think he can handle being back here. Especially not El’s room.”
Joyce flinched at the mention of El’s name, her whole body recoiling ever so slightly as she pulled the cigarette out of her mouth. Jonathan noticed, and without thinking, reached across the table, his fingers wrapping around hers in a silent show of support as she exhaled the gray smoke.
“We all need some time, Mom,” he murmured, barely above a whisper. “But we’ll get through this. I promise.”
She tried to smile for him, but it barely reached her eyes. The promise felt empty in the stillness of the kitchen. Hopper wandered through his days lost in his own fog, Will forced himself to be strong for Mike, Jonathan spent his energy holding everyone else up. And Joyce? She poured everything she had into Hopper, ignoring her own pain just to keep him afloat. Around and around it went—a kind of grief that never stopped spinning, a heaviness that pressed on all of them and refused to lift. Joyce couldn’t see the way out. Not yet.
“I’m heading back now,” Jonathan said softly. “Just wanted to check in on you first.”
“I’m fine, honey.” The words slipped out before Joyce could stop them—automatic, empty. Even she could hear how flat they sounded.
Jonathan bit back a sigh, settling for a look that said he wasn’t fooled. “Try to get some sleep, okay?” He let go of her hand as he rose from his chair, reluctant to leave her alone in the quiet kitchen.
Joyce forced a smile, the kind that felt stiff around the edges, dropped her cigarette into the ashtray, and stood up too. “Tell Will I love him, will you? And tell him I’m thinking about him.” She folded Jonathan into a hug, holding him tight—maybe a little tighter than usual, as if she could transfer some of her strength just by not letting go. “I love you, too,” she whispered into his shoulder, her voice wavering.
“I love you as well, Mom,” Jonathan murmured back, clinging to her for a moment longer before pulling away. “Please… get some rest. I’ll see you soon.” He said it once more, gentler this time, and thought he saw the barest nod—just enough to let him pretend she’d heard him.
Maybe she only did it to ease his worry, but for now, that was enough.